probing a system for drives in the pre phase

Lance Braswell ltbraswell at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 13 18:53:33 UTC 2005


Found a reference to this in the archives I believe.
Kudos to Jesse Keating: 

http://geek.j2solutions.net/stuff/autokickfc2.py

It's an example for doing some %pre probing to
dynamically generate a ks.cfg based on probed for disk
drives.

I have a requirement to support automated
installations (from CD) of RHEL 4 on somewhat
arbitrary PC hardware. I want to have complete control
over most of the install process but I need the
customer to basically make some decisions about the
boot/OS drives to be used before the rest of the
kickstart process begins. So what I was planning on
doing was using the above autokickfc2.py program as a
starting point for my script.

I would run my program as a %pre step. I want the
system to boot up and present a simple text menu that
presents the users with a list of found drives. The
user would select one or more of these drives. From
those selected drives, I would create a single root
volume group and then generate my logical volumes
accordingly (based on size mainly). 

I would be using the abstraction provided by the
python isys module because I don't think I need to
worry about whether it's ide, scsi, or hardware raid.
In other words I just want "harddrives" as anaconda
would see them and deal with them in an abstract way
for presentation to the customer and for partitioning.

So here are my questions:

Does this seem feasible?
Haven't been able to find any external documentation
for the parted and isys python modules. Anyone have
some pointers?
Will I have access the the console for user input
during the %pre phase when my script is running?
What is a good python module for handling user input?
I'm pretty new to PC hardware, given a list of
harddrives that anaconda (and my script) would see,
how can I determine if it _would be_ bootable?

Sorry to ask such noob questions. I can hack perl but
only grok python a little.


		
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